The Chaser Report - Capitalism Is The Problem | Tom Ballard

Episode Date: November 8, 2022

Tom Ballard joins Dom Knight to breakdown everything wrong with the world from the perspective of a millennial, which Tom dissects in his new book 'I Millennial' - out November 30th! Who is creating all the problems? Is it the Boomers, the rich, or the political class? Tom Ballard has done the research and gives you the answers, but funnily. More information about Tom's new book can be found here. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The Chaser Report is recorded on Gatigal Land. Striving for mediocrity in a world of excellence, this is The Chaser Report. Hello and welcome to The Chaser Report. No, Charles. Today, it's me, Dom Knight. But we do have the wonderful Tom Ballard here to talk about his new book. I'm a millennial. Hello, Tom. Hello, Dom.

Thank you for honoring my wishes. I refuse to appear on any podcast with Charles Firth. We've got a lot of history there. A lot of history. A lot of history. Which we can't go into. A lot of bad blood. a lot of awkwardness.

Now, look, you've done a shit ton of work on this book, Tom. I was expecting, you know, I'm a leniential. I was expecting stuff about smashed avocado and property. Yeah. I wasn't expecting a fairly comprehensive history of Australian labor relations, the economy and the environment. Is this what you do after tonightly ends? You just pick up a pen and start writing.

I think it's what happens when a fucking pandemic ruins everything. And you've got a lot of time with your heads. And you start, the world is going to shit, as I've been doing for, you know, quite a few years now. And you just get pulled down every single rabbit hole. And you realize, oh, if you were to explain everything about society and give a comprehensive summary of how my entire generation has been screwed over on so many fronts, you really do need to do, yeah, a fair bit of reading.

And I tried to write the book that I wish someone had handed me the day after Donald Trump was elected and I started losing my mind about the state of the world. They said, look, here's everything you need to know, to become the socialist you were born to be. here we go. Yes, and I mean, I don't want to give a spoiler, but it does seem pretty clear from fairly early on that socialism's where you're heading with this. And I'm just imagining basically,

the book is an argument for why you should join Tom Ballard, AOC, and Bernie Sanders, you know, passing a bucket bong around dreaming of a better world. But it is incredibly gorecy. Does that sound fun? It does, look, it does sound more fun than the last few years we've had. But the thing that gets me,

firstly is that the light you define all the generations and what makes me irritated is that I'm Gen X right I'm definitively Gen X and yet just about every problem you diagnose I have so I've aged out of the problems I'm having all the problems of a millennial without even being in the right age group without any of the cred yeah you guys get screwed it's like being a triple j listener when you're 40 it's just like this is not for me and yet this is all I I have. But Scott Morrison is Gen X and Bill Shorten as Gen X, even though they project a very strong boomer energy. So, you know, we should give the disclaimer that it's all bullshit. Most of it's just, you know, helping people to market, you know, advertisers and marketers sell

this shit that we don't need. That's what the generational categories have sort of become. But generally speaking, you can sort of make these broad generalizations about stuff that happen to people who are born at a certain time. And if millennials or all of us sort of came of age around the dawning of the new millennium. That's when all the neoliberal restructuring was like fully implemented. We were fully born into the neoliberal society and then bingo, bingo, bingo, what do you know? The world's on fire. We don't have any rights. We can't afford a house. Everything's privatised and we're all going to die. So to the point in which X's don't own assets, you can join us in the struggle against that. Okay, perfect. Yeah. So if you've done a bad

job of being Gen X, you're effectively an honorary millennial. I'm very happy to be here. You have Given a nice kind of delineation point between the generations, though, which is that your generation is more familiar with smooth criminal by alien ant farm than the Michael Jackson original, which I must say I do sympathise. You've had a rough, you've had a rough cultural scene to grow up into with that. This is being aloneal to me. I first learned about the Smiths by watching Charmed, and the theme song to Charmed was a horrible cover of how soon is now by the Smiths.

So again, that's the postmodern self-referential reboot culture that I've also been bathed in my entire life. And it means that, yes, we're both nostalgic for something that happened two days ago or for a time in which we weren't even alive. And our brains are destroyed by the internet and, yeah, pop culture, postmodern nostalgia that doesn't really make any sense. So this book is a pretty thorough cataloging of why your generation and even those younger than you is screwed. and more broadly, the world. And you break it down into various categories. And certainly work. Work is insecure and the pay as shit,

seems to be your view of the world. How did we get there? Well, look, work's been shit for a really long time. And, you know, it used to be way shitter. And one could argue that when the boss used to own you as a slave, that was like heaps worse than working at McDonald's today. That's fair enough. But basically, the way that our class

sister works under capitalism means that these people own stuff and there are these bosses and there's everybody else. We don't own stuff. All we have to do to make a living into survive and get all the state decent stuff we need is to sell our labour time. That's it. That sort of makes us the very broadly defined working class. But when for our parents generation, for the boomers, work sucked for them too, but they had the ability to change it because more than half the working population were members of their trade union and trade unions actually used to do stuff. They used to go on strike and they used to have collective power, which saw, you know, know, the share of national income peaking in the 1970s at about 60%.

60% of all national income was going to labor as opposed to capital. That's now completely just totally trended down over the past 50 years because the ruling class waged a war on workers and took away our ability to organize and to go on strike. And unfortunately, the Labor Party and the bureaucracy of the union movement played a pretty big role in disciplining naughty workers who were going on strike throughout the 80s and 90s through the accord process. and all of that culminated in dropping union density, weaker powerful workers, more powerful bosses,

and a much more casualized, weakened, insecure labor market, which means now we don't even think about joining a union. Union density is so low. For young people, it's something like four or five percent of people under 25 of members of their trade union. Because we haven't heard about them. We don't know what they do. You know, we just take the weekend for granted or what have you. And oh, no, that actually, the weekend actually exists because people used to go on strike and take on the bosses and demand a better deal. And we don't do that these days, unfortunately. See what I mean, you've done serious work.

You're putting this put together. I know, that wasn't funny at all, wasn't it. No, but it's... I've got to work better. The thing that I like about this, Tom, is that like many of your stand-up shows, you mix searing reality with jokes, many dirty jokes, but also...

Swear words. An incredible archive of hilarious photos and trivia from your own youth. I don't know how you've kept all. this stuff, but it's very comprehensive. So that 60% figure, what is that today? I mean, 60% doesn't seem like necessarily that much of the total value produced to go to people who do most of the work to produce it. But I suspect that the figure is much lower today in a world where Elon Musk is worth more than many countries. Indeed, yes, has a higher net worth than the GDP of Sri Lanka, I believe, old Elon. Oh, that may change very soon. Yeah, he's doing his

dumb best to lose that. at the time of recording. Yes, well, I think in 2020, for the first time, that balance slipped under 50%, so less than 50% of the national income, share of a national income, is going to labour, the people who actually do stuff to make society function. And I think, like, that's actually really the story

of the past 50 years. Everything has become, we've moved into this asset economy. So it's not about being able to work enough, get a good job, work hard, and you'll get ahead, you'll be able to, say, afford a house, for example. all that's that's gone increasingly for younger people now it's about how much do you own do you own assets did you manage to get into the housing market before it went crazy do you have lightly taxed superannuation assets do you have a bunch of shares that is that attacks very lightly as well because if you own

stuff and then you just like give all the stuff that you own to your kids you'll be fine you'll be totally sorted the economy works for you just fine that's no worries but for everybody else we're pretty much locked out and all you have to do is work but that doesn't help you get ahead. That's the world that millennials really inherited, yeah. And a lot of this does come down to, as you say, in the book, it comes down to the old-fashioned, I guess, seems outmoded to many class analysis. I mean, we're meant to be living in a classless paradise here in Australia where there's no aristocracy. There was once the notion of a Bunya parastocracy. But when you think about how things are divided, okay, there might be kind of mobility between the classes if you

happen to make a lot of money. But in fact, it is enormously different if you grow up rich versus growing up poor. And you chart this throughout all aspects, really, of life, whether it's education, housing, labour, those who have led a vastly different life from those who don't. Yeah, I think that's really the big light bulb moment for millennial socialists. We've been told that all these concepts of class and 1970s class warfare and the politics of envy all that's outdated that's all gone you know that's very old-fashioned ideas and yet then and then the world goes to shit along comes Bernie Sanders Jeremy Corbyn who've been saying the same stuff for decades and decades and decades who hail from that kind of old left tradition and young people sort of

say well what they're saying makes sense it's not like those ideas have been completely resolved all the things about capitalism totally makes sense in fact more than ever we have this this tiny collection of people who own almost everything and then you got everybody else And you can't just wish that away by saying, oh, we don't do class politics anymore or, you know, class war is outdated and stop saying that. Like, class war is being waged on ordinary people every single day by the billionaire demon lizards. And we're just seeing that. We're just recognizing that for the real time. And I think that's why leftist socialist politics speaks to young people who are looking down the barrel of renting forever, never being able to build enough wealth to live a decent life and live in security.

And, you know, having to deal with a million evil corporations to just get through a, single day and you know looking around them as the world burns or floods it all kind of like makes sense that is the thing that car it's a very funny book don't did leave out of dust capital is um is the lizard hypothesis he didn't want to be bad at the capitalist plus but he didn't he didn't come up with explanation that they're actually shape shifting lizards and we owe david ick a lot for um for writing that to our understanding of the world shout outs to iick yeah carmarks was very bitchy I mean, I haven't read a lot of marks that I refuse to until Andrew Bolt does. I refuse to actually sit down and read capital.

But my understanding is that a huge part of his writings is just him bitching about his critics and just talking shit about their physical appearance and being extremely uncivil and hitting blow the bell when it comes to anybody who said that he was incorrect. So I respect that. Which sounds quite like Elon Musk in a way. But... All me. Yeah.

Yeah. No, look, the book is very funny. There are heaps of jokes amidst the searing and depressing take on. reality. And it is true. I mean, work is, it's the insecurity of it that gets me. And I mean, people in our line of work, yes, admittedly, people like you and I have chosen to work in the media. And that's something we did presumably because we loved it and thought it would be really fun, which it's proven to be most of the time. But the insecurity of work that I guess we experience somewhat through choice having decided to work in fields like comedy is just so

common these days. And it seems as though for so many years, the push has been to try and make everybody into contractors. I mean, if you look at the Uber drivers and delivery, you know, couriers and so on, pretending that everyone's their own little small business and therefore that employers don't have to do anything for them. And this just seems part of the broader movement of selling people on individualism that isn't actually in their interests when they think about it. Yes. And just deferring to the market on every front, right? So the labor market is just a market. And people's labor is just a commodity that can be bought and sold by richer people who can buy and sell workers as much as they want.

And it's never going to produce a fair society because the interests of the owners and the bosses are diametrically opposed to everybody else. The boss wants to cut costs and maximize profits. We want to be paid as much as money as possible to live a decent life. Okay, they're just constantly going at each other. And again, I just think it's a fantasy. The labor government says We can bring all these people together. We can bring the BCA together with the ACTU, and we can all come to a sensible solution to our problems in the middle in which everyone will be happy.

And you know, no, no, you won't. Because capital wants more capital and wants to screw over labor. We'll happily screw over labor in the process of achieving that. But isn't it fascinating that this stuff was pointed out years ago? I mean, these are not new ideas, the notion that they're all in class, that businesses are actually not on your side. And yet partly because some of the people who took these ideas and created a totalitarian state.

I've hurt the brand somewhat, Tom. But also there's this idea of false consciousness, which is one of the things that I vaguely remember from uni is that these systems create a set of beliefs that things are okay and that things are as they're meant to be and that they're, you know, the American dream. If you just work hard enough, you can achieve an amazing lifestyle. And this seems to be the thing that so many of us are sold on it

and have been for so long is that there's nothing we can do about this things as they should be it's a fair and just system that can't possibly be changed and i mean i've got to say hats off to capitalism and for all those involved for creating that system because that is an overwhelming belief there are there's not a huge groundswell of people at the moment you seem to be trying to start on with the book tom but there's not a huge groundswell of people going hang on this system is absolutely fucked and unfair let's change it which you would think might be a more popular view at this point in our history? Well, hang on.

I think there's heaps of people saying this system is fucked. The let's change it bit. That's an extra little step. And I think a lot of people don't get to that bit because they've had lots of people telling them that they're going to change the system for a very long time and nothing seems to change because of how screwed up the system is. So all these people come in with promises about how things are going to change

when actually they don't really want to change that much or they actually can't change that much because their hands are so much tied because of state capture. And also, they're probably not into let's changing the entire system because they're too busy trying to deal with the consequences of the system. Like, I have a lot of sympathy for people who aren't politically engaged because they're too busy working free jobs to pay the goddamn rent or to raise their kids or whatever. Like you can totally understand why, you know, this idea of young people being disengaged from politics. It's like, well, you've got to show us a little

something here. There's got to be a two-way street. Politics actually has to represent some kind of level of change. We need to be able to imagine and see some path by joining a union, by joining a political party that won't make us want to stab our own eyes out with a pen, you know. Like that's, that's kind of on politics, so I understand why that's the case. But yes, you're totally right. And again, Gramski, which I haven't read, and I refuse, I refuse to read any of the original text, but I've read some tweets about him. And yes, the way capitalism just creates an ideology and convince, and we just, if we don't see through the matrix, you just realize that everything in our society is based around these kind of prevailing ideology, which is, yeah, work hard and you'll,

you'll do great. If you're unemployed, if you're not happy in your life, that's entirely your fault as an individual. There's nothing to do with the biggest structures that make about society. I think unemployment is the big one, right? So after the depression or after World War 2, the expectation was the government should provide jobs to get people to work, right? We all said, oh yeah, unemployment is like a government responsibility. Then neoliberalism comes along, the economic crisis of the 70s, and suddenly, you know, they're all dull bludges and it's actually your problem. Even though we need unemployment, like there was a deliberate level of unemployment in the economy in order to keep a tamper down on inflation, right? That's literally economic policy

that there needs to be a certain amount of people unemployed at any one time. Like that's what the central bank and all the economist's heads actually want. Like we can't actually get to serious meaningful full employment. Even though that's like a deliberate strategy, we still hang shit on people who can't get a job because not enough jobs exist and we make fun of them on current affair like that's that's ideology my friend it does seem to be but you do admit though Tom that um as much as you hang shit on Elon Musk and and I can see the logic at that he has fixed one of the problems you identify in the book already which is that you out yourself as a blue check a blue check member of the Twitter artie in the course of the book and Elon's open that up eight bucks a month

anyone can be Tom Ballard on Twitter oh you can't impersonate Tom Ballard I think he can be as Was it a chase a headline? Elon Musk charges $8 a month for free speech or something? I don't like that. Yes. Now, this is the big question. Should I invest in maintaining my blue check? Because I always thought that post-revolution,

it'll be very easy to identify who should be first against the wall. You just get all the Twitter blue checks. Obviously, they're all class enemies. Get rid of them. And that made me feel bad because I'm one of them. But if I no longer have the blue tick and I'm a leader of the revolution, then I think it'll be time. It's probably a good time to lose the check, fair point.

But a lot of this, when we talk about this in Australia, everyone's simple in Australia of wealth and security comes down to housing. And as an example of how you kind of spice the economic analysis with jokes, it's a very good insight. If you don't have a house, you have nowhere to masturbate. And I think that speaks to all of us. A house is somewhere, it's not somewhere just to lay your head, it's somewhere where you lay your head and gain a fleeting moment of pleasure in this horrible world.

Well, I mean, some people are masturbating on the street. That's certainly true. Some of the people who are really at the end of the housing crisis. I can't say I've tried it, but I can't knock it until you've tried it. Yes, look, that's just an example of just me laying out, hey, homes are good. Most of the chapters start with some basics. Like, we need a decent job to have a good life. You need somewhere to live.

Education is nice. Okay, so there's just these basic premises that we come to these kind of big picture things. Services should be run well in the cheapest and most efficient possible way. You know, these sort of basic premises start each chapter. And in the housing one, I'm saying housing is a basic human need. But, hey, what do you know in Australia? We've had the genius idea to turn them into products and commodities and financialize the housing market.

So they're not just somewhere that you live, you know, as a human being. It's not shelter now. These are financial assets and asset classes that we can use to build wealth and get ahead by owning hundreds of them and exploiting other people's need for housing. That's the genius move we've made. I must say I'm impressed that there's a lot of sources quoted in the book. And the fact that you managed to get 2GB in there for a particularly delicious moment where some guy rings up about how it's tough for landlords as well.

And Ben Fordham, to his credit, asks the key question, doesn't he, Tom? He says, how many investment properties do you own? And this gentleman, David, I think you say this, I forget now. Can I ask you out of interest how many you've got, David? How many rental properties do you own? Well, okay, 283. 283 rental properties. Just a cool 283 investment properties that he owns,

and he said he works really hard for those. You're not rich in this country until you hit 300. That's the rule I've understood. Is this person a member of the Senate by any chance? I guess they thought they all have multiple. How can they possibly make decisions about housing policy when they all have investment properties? Or if they don't now, they're trying to pay one off with their...

waging Canberra. Again, this is just the politics of envydom. And then you should just focus on your own work. I do. I envy them. They're on our side. Labor is on our side. And no one will be left behind. None of our tenants will be left behind, even though we're jacking up the red by 60% because we need to cover, yeah, the repayments on all our other investment properties. It's crazy. It's an insane system. One house, new rule, everyone, one house each. No one gets a beach house until everyone's got one house and then we move on. Okay. But where's the incentive? Where's the incentive to go and create and work and just acquire and negative gear? Where's the incentive to negative gear?

It's so much hard work involved in just owning a house, isn't it? Like, you're just, every day, you're just owning that house, and you're working hard on owning that house. And it's just like, I own that house. I mean, I'm just flat out working hard owning this house. The agent will get in touch saying, you know, do you want to repair the bathroom? And you've got to basically, I think the policies you put that off for a few months, as long as you possibly can, just to remind the tenant that they're tenants.

just to make sure they stay in their place. That's the way you do it. But you have particular contempt, and I really enjoyed your contempt for those young people we hear in the media who own a huge number of houses that have rolled out to show us that it is possible that the system is fair

if you just got a bit of gumption, a little bit of true grit, you two can be a landlord. They're all insane. They've got these barometers. Like, they go on the Today Show, whatever they say. I've always wanted to own 29 houses by the time I turned 29.

And I think you're not raised right. Your parents did something wrong to you. That's that's a wrong thing. That's a bad thing to want and it's even a worse thing to actually do. And I guess by every year they turn a new age and they increase the number of properties that they own. They're incredibly leveraged. Their entire life, the entire job is owning houses. And even though, again, I'm sure they read the news, there's a housing crisis. Every single day, you probably read a story about how people are struggling to find anywhere just to live or being, as you say, taking to the clear. as by their evil demon landlords, these people seem to have no problem with the idea that they need to own lots and lots of houses and make as much money as possible out of the very crisis that they are making worse. It's not right, I tell us you. Yeah, well, maybe they'll read the book. There's one or two people you quote in the book. I think if they come across it, they'll get a little bit of an education, I suspect. And you do talk about education. It's not every author who post a photo of them with their UAI, T-E-R, or whatever it's called in Victoria. You and your brother are fucking nerds, Tom Ballard.

He's a bigger nerd than me, though. He got a VCN to score of 99.90, and I got a pathetic, miserable, 99.80. And so I laid down the family there. I did shame my family there, yes. I didn't do any maths or science, so I feel like I did both drama and theatre studies in my year-year-12 year. So it's pretty easy to get a good life. They should have posters of you saying you can actually get a good score doing theater and drama. That's because that's not what you're told.

You're told if you do that art stuff. It's a disaster. That is true. Yes. And yes, I remember students in my year 12 who chose subjects specifically for the scaling or whatever. Most miserable students hands down in year 12, just like having the worst time being like, I don't understand any of this. I hate it.

But the scaling, oh, the scaling will help me. But I mean, education is the thing that transforms people's lives, isn't it? I mean, this is the way to, I guess, look at redistributing things and create more opportunities for people. Admittedly, that does accept it. That does kind of accept the premise of a world where people who graduate from things like law deserve to earn more money. But nevertheless, I mean, this is where I learned about all this stuff, was at university

where you start looking at the economy and the way that rules are made in society. when you find out what they are then you can start thinking about whether they're fair and these might be conversations people don't get to have in the current education system if they don't get to faf around at uni like I did and get to think about all these things while bludging off our parents

and all the government I don't know how I guess you guys are the exception but I don't know how radicalising law degrees or the kind of people who are attracted to law well you wouldn't know because you got into one and dropped out Tom Ballard I did drop out in grace that's true

you made up it you open up a spot for someone who wanted to be there, I suspect. I don't know what happened, because I got a scholarship to do that course. And I was thinking about it, I assume the uni just saved the money. They didn't reallocate that scholarship money to get anybody else. Some poor striver out there who didn't get the scholarship because dilettante Ballard wanted to go and do comedy six weeks into uni. And, you know, having persisted with the degree, I think yours was the better approach, actually.

Thank you very much. The Chaser Report. extra whispers. Yes, look, I think sometimes education, people like, education is going to fix everything and all we need to do is give everyone a good education. And sometimes you go, well, not necessarily, and, you know, that's not necessarily civil bullet to solve all of society's issues. But having said that, education is very nice in all the various forms it takes, from vocational education to university to, yeah, a good primary and secondary education or any kind of training that people want to undertake, for sure. But again, that's another thing we've turned

into an economic asset, not a social good, not something that a rich society should provide. It's young people because learning stuff is good and broading one's mind is generally considered to be a really nice thing. No, no. Now it's just the thing that you get, the accreditation you get so that you earn enough money and you help capitalism keep turning round and round. And, you know, once you pursue that long enough, that's when you get to the insane reforms that the coalition government brought in, which said, if you do an arts degree, you're going to pay a million dollars for that as a punishment for daring to study the humanities, you little Marxist, gender, queer, cuck.

That's basically what Scott Morris said. I mean, it's a bad way to run society. It is strange, isn't it? But I know people who have followed all this principle, they studied law, their partners in law firms in some cases. They've ticked all the boxes that the system told them to tick. But even they, and these are people in their 40s now, even they don't feel any security about being able to afford the future

and being able to afford housing, even in the places where they grew up. I have no idea where the housing has all gone. I mean, maybe just to the 29-year-olds who bought 29 houses. But the people who've played by the rules of the system, let alone people who object to the rules or don't. The people who have actually done what the system tells you to do don't feel secure and are fearful about the future and not having enough money to retire and not being able to afford

to educate their children on whatever they might want to do. So who are the people who have all the money and all this stuff? I'm baffled when I read about the property, property prices and people paying three, four, five million dollars for properties. Who the fuck are they? Because I grew up as part of the elite and even I don't know who they are. You're a downwardly mobile elite. I'm a broke-ass member.

No, I look, I, not unlike you, I was lucky enough to get fancy education and so on. And so I got to meet people who did these sorts of things. I did law and all that. But yes, I was one of the brokest people in always at my private school and at my fancy university. I mean, I'm from that world, but I never belonged in it because it never had the money to actually feel comfortable. Well, when it comes to housing, like literally, I think 70% of all housing wealth is in the hands of the burden. It's like people 55 and over hold 70% of all housing wealth in this country. So that's the answer when it comes to where all the housing cash goes.

And you understand why no politician is brave enough to suggest that maybe house prices should go down, because that would be verbatant and that would make their voters very angry. And yes, totally take your point. People who graduate, like graduate unemployment is increasing and the insecurity of graduate jobs. Most jobs, or not most jobs, but increasingly more and more jobs require an undergraduate degree too. That's the other crazy thing with student debt. We tell young people to get a good education and then we say, oh, suddenly because you want a good education, we're going to saddle you with a extraordinary amount of debt.

It's like, you told us to get this. Again, we're doing all the right things according to you. Even if you tick the boxes. No one wants to shoulder the costs of actually doing that. And then as your book points out, the boxes are fairly stupid, actually, and the whole system is problematic. So what are we, I guess another tier, which we should touch on briefly, is the environment.

I mean, this is, if you want depressing subjects in your book, it goes even far beyond the labor market and housing and education, what the fuck do we even do with that? How did you look at this in such detail and write chapters on the environment without just basically going, you know what, I'll give up. This is too misery-inducing. It's just every time you read a headline about the environment, it just makes you want to punch things.

No, there are now two seasons in Australia, on fire and underwater. That's basically what we've got to. And even if we changed everything tomorrow, we did all the right things immediately, you know, you've still got all this locked in heating. And climate change is going to be a factor of human life on this planet for the rest of the century. There's nothing to be done about that at this stage. There's, I think, a front page of The Economist on the day we're recording this saying 1.5 degrees is probably over.

We're probably not going to be able to limit it to that. And that's the Economist, by the way. Like the main newspaper of Capital. Like, that's, if they're aware of it, what the hell, man? Yes. I mean, I would blame a lot of people who read and work out the Economist say to play, probably. But that's where we're at. The fact is that even they're making headlines about it.

And this is a problem. As you mentioned, this is intergenerational stuff. I mean, you talk about this in terms of wealth and housing and so on, the notion that younger people are supposed to somehow stand on the shoulders of those who come before them, rather than being fucked over by them. But that will never be more true than it is with the planet, because boomers aren't going to see what they've done and the generations before them. Sure.

Well, again, you know, I don't, hopefully by the end of the book, you're realizing that while we've had a lot of jokes at boomer's expense, and they are funny, and particularly jokes to make them angry. Oh, don't you back down now, Ballard. No, no, no, but again, it's class analysis, right? If we were born when our parents were, we'd have done all the same shit, okay? Then there were just people living their lives, making all the rational decisions, okay? They didn't have much ordinary people, don't have much power over shaping society or macroeconomic forces.

So it's not like they were laughing and saying, yeah, ha, this is going to screw about our kids tomorrow. That's not the case. And today, there are millennials who have more money than anybody else in human history, and there are boomers who are homeless. So again, you've got to bring it back to class. No, that's true. But also with climate, it's infuriating because the people who knew, who did actually know what was happening, that fossil fuels were cooking the planet, that was going to be really bad, was the forces of fossil fuel capital and some scientists at the top.

There's this report from 1960s with Lyndon Johnson was handed from his scientific committee saying, hey, this is a bad. I mean, the science of climate change dates back to like the 1860s or whatever, and we'd figured out the link to fossil fuels in the early 1900s. But, you know, when it got serious at the highest levels of government was in the early 60s. And from that point, we really probably should have seriously changed things and started asking some big questions. But hey, what do you know? The forces of fossil fuel capitalism used all the money and wealth that they've got out of, you know, digging up stuff and selling off resources to fund campaigns of disinformation and try and convince us that it's not a problem and that we shouldn't change anything.

So that's once again a beautiful example of capitalism working to kill us all for the sake of profit. which it does very well you got to doff your cap to it it's a pretty impressive adversary it's really no it's very good and it's very good at profiting off its own critiques you know everyone doing art and hey I've tried to sell a book here

critiquing capitalism and I want people to pre-order that book so I can make more money it's genius and you're someone who sells tickets to shows and needs with money and all this sort of stuff no well I guess the thing that you try which is bravest of all after fairly comprehensively diagnosing all these problems in a couple of hundred pages

with graphs in places is you try and actually come up with something constructive to say at the end of it which I mean frankly after after the book thank God because it's a pretty pretty depressing read in places thank God there's jokes in it because to get you to keep turning the pages jokes plus amusingly embarrassing photos of Tom and family from from their past your family must really enjoy you scraping to the archives. Where did you come to? We mentioned socialism, democratic socialism, and redistribution as a concept and the bold notion of somehow not destroying the planet. What does that look like in practice? Do people, I mean, millennials are 21% of the population?

There's a lot of votes out there. What are people doing with them? Is it possible to change within the system and simply vote for different people? Well, voting for different people would be really nice, particularly if people are currently voting for the Labor Party expecting that to bring about the kind of change that we need. In my personal opinion, that is not going to be the case. In many ways, the Labor Party completely absorbed and implemented neoliberalism and is unable in its current state to seriously radically change things. And it doesn't seem that interested in doing that anyway, right? He wants to stay in the sensible centre, et cetera, et cetera, and steady the ship as it goes, right um so that's bad the Australian greens are by no means perfect whatsoever but the thing that

brought me to them in 2020 was was this you know this move particularly within the Queensland greens to pretty explicitly say capitalism is bad neoliberalism is the problem we should have big bold populist left wing policies that means taxing the rich to make life better for ordinary people and to get more democracy going everywhere so that that's the thing that appeals to me about where the Australian greens could be we've still got a very long way to to go, of course, as people are aware, you know, we're on 40% or something. So work on that would be great, and that's certainly where my political affiliations have ended up. I am a member of my union, but again, yes, as a self-employed contractor, I don't, I often don't have

other colleagues to organise with or one specific evil boss to take on, so that's kind of annoying. Imagine if comedians did unionize, that would be a fascinating experiment in labor relations. it would well that happened in the 70s at the comedy store when the comedy store in L.A. was ripping everybody up yeah people like people like Dave let him in all these cool 70s comics try to unionize to force Mitzie Shaw who ran the comedy store to pay people for their comedy and Jay fucking Leno crossed the picket line because of course he did because he's Jay fucking Leno like the mother of Polly Shaw she she has a lot to answer for she sounded terrible when it was absolutely exploiting people for their work

But yes, on those rare occasions, that's worth doing. There's no great, you know, silver bullet solution at the end of the book. I suppose by the end of the book, I'm trying to explain how I got to democratic socialism. Or at the very least, how you realize after a while, oh, the problem is capitalism. The political economy is really the main game with almost everything, all the cultural stuff. It's great for comedy. It's fun to talk about and laugh about. Mostly it doesn't matter.

The main thing is follow the money. And is this going to make ordinary working people better off? Does this benefit the people who already own lots of stuff? Fuck rich people. That's the main enemy, you know, and the rest of us, the working class, white, black, gay, straight, trans, cisgendered, able body, disabled, whatever. We have way more in common with each other that we do with billionaires like, you know, Clyde Palmer and Gina Reinhardt. So that's probably where the fight should be. And the interesting thing is, I guess, in a democracy, the strange thing about it is that it comes down to what individual things.

is important what their worldview is. And this is the thing, if more people thought like you, if more people read the book and reached the conclusions that you've read, if more people signed on to Team Ballard and, you know, followed the arguments that you painstakingly loud in the book, then you would have a change in politics, at least to some degree, whereas I guess from your perspective, it looks a bit like Turkey's voting for Christmas at the moment.

People vote for the entrenched system because they think that voting otherwise will take away what they've got and in a country that is relatively rich which Australia certainly is in global terms it is fascinating how successfully the side of politics that is

very clearly on the side of the wealthiest people has managed to get the majority of Australians time and time again thinking yep that's actually that's our side we're on the same side as the current system even though if you look at the notion of everyone kind of banning

together in their class interests. That's not what they do. No. And that is, again, the neoliberal era, the age of individualism. Reduce everything to the individual level. So don't think about society in terms of structures. Don't think about yourself as part of a class or, you know, dismiss all any notions of social solidarity, the idea that people on the other side of the country, rich people the other side of the country should pay taxes so that, you know, you have the basic needs of your life met. That's all nonsense. That's silliness. No, we're all just individuals living our lives in the market competing against one another. I mean, that is the genius of that revolution

that has, I think, yes, brought society to where we are now, which is often a very lonely society, a society that doesn't work very well, and a society with not only massive inequality, but increasing inequality. And that is the crazy thing of the boomer era. Post-World War II, inequality was actually falling

in Western capitalist societies. Okay, actually it was trending down. Seventies changes everything, and that explodes again, and now we've got, you know, 2,000 billionaires who own and the 10 richest men own more than the bottom half of humanity, right? That's actually a reverse trend over the past 50 years. So again, that's a great sales pitch that capitalism has and that neoliberalism has. You're an individual. Don't worry

about anybody else. Just focus on your own life. You don't owe anything to anyone and we don't live in a society. And I guess I think that's bullshit. I think most people really, if they think about it, know that's bullshit. That's hopefully the hope that stays alive. the idea that we can recognize that as being bullshit, that we do have obligations to each other. And Australia is great. And at the end, I've tried to make the point. We don't live in the worst possible world,

even though I sound like a bit of misery guts, reading this book, I suppose. There's lots of ways in which Australia is great. The frustration comes when you think about how much better this country could be and how much harder life is when it really doesn't need to be. And the only reason it is as hard as it is for a lot of people is because some extremely greedy, rich people on the top

want to hold on to as much as they possibly can and I'm prepared to give up their yachts for the sake of other people being able to not be in poverty. It is bizarre as we hear about people ordering multiple $100 million super yachts and yet not even from a moment going. That would feed a lot of people. That would be good. But think of the yacht makers and the jobs that they need to fulfill.

Anyway, Tom, congratulations. Congratulations on being an individual contractor who's released onto the free market a product, a unit. This book called I'm Millennium. It comes out at the end of November. All the best with making heaps of money and being able to buy a super yacht and forget about all the stuff that got you to where you are.

Thank you, Dom. Go stage three tax cuts. Yay! Our gears from Road with Pagiarast Creative Network and we'll catch you tomorrow. And check out Tom's podcast like I'm a six-year-old while you're at it. Thanks, Dom.